How much does a custom website cost? It’s often the first question, and the honest answer starts with other questions. A five-page site and a bilingual store with two hundred products are no more priced the same way than a city bike and a camper van. Here is what drives the price of a website, our starting prices for the most common projects, and the costs that come after launch, the ones people forget when they compare.
What drives the price of a website
The number of pages matters less than you might think. What costs money is the number of different sections to design and develop: a team block, a services grid, a testimonial, a form. Ten pages built from the same sections take less work than six pages that look nothing alike.
Design comes next. Mockups for each template, approved with you before development, take time, and save a lot more later. Content too: copy and images ready to go in add nothing to the price, while content to write, translate or carry over from an old site adds to the project.
Each extra language multiplies the work on everything that is displayed: pages, menus, forms, confirmation emails. Features do the rest. A contact form is simple; appointment booking, an online store, a member area or a connection with your CRM are projects within the project. And if the site replaces an existing one, migrating the content and redirecting every old address are part of the price.
What shouldn’t change the price, on the other hand: speed, security and accessibility. With us, they are included by default, like the seatbelt in a car. They aren’t options added at the end.
Custom website cost: our starting prices
A price range wouldn’t mean much. A business website can have five pages and four templates, or two hundred pages and forty different templates. Here instead are our starting prices, before taxes, for a simple project of each type:
| Type of site | Starting at |
|---|---|
| Business website | $2,500 |
| Bilingual business website | $4,000 |
| Online store (Shopify or WooCommerce) | $8,000 |
What pushes a project above that price is almost always the same thing: more different sections, content to produce, one more language or a feature that requires development. The price of your project, for its part, is set by the quote, on a written scope.
Compare these prices with those of other providers, but for the same scope. A starting price says nothing until you know what it includes: mockups or not, number of templates, languages, features, and what is included by default.
The costs after launch
The price of the site is only the beginning. When you compare two quotes, add what the site will cost every year, because those amounts last longer than the project.
The domain name is the smallest line: a .ca domain renews for around US$14 a year at a registrar like Namecheap. Hosting varies more. Managed WordPress hosting starts at around US$28 a month at WP Engine and US$30 at Kinsta, billed annually. Cloudways manages a cloud server for you from US$11 a month. We explain how to choose in our article on web hosting.
Then come the licences for paid plugins, such as ACF Pro, Gravity Forms or Polylang Pro, to renew every year. And the upkeep: updates, backups, monitoring. You can do it yourself, in which case the licences stay your responsibility. If you would rather hand it off, our maintenance plans range from $125 to $375 a month, and the licences for the plugins the site uses are included. New pages and new features are done separately, from a block of hours.
Purchased theme, page builder or Wix: cheaper upfront
A purchased theme, a page builder or a platform like Wix costs less at launch. For a first site or a very small budget, it is a defensible choice.
The difference gets paid later. A slow site that needs optimizing, licences and subscriptions that pile up, a layout that comes apart with each change, and a redesign that arrives sooner than planned. We compare these options in our article on Elementor, Divi and themes. Over five years, the cheapest site at the start isn’t always the one that costs the least.
What drives up the bill without anyone noticing
Overruns rarely come from the technology. They come from the project itself.
Content that arrives late, first. Development stops, or moves ahead with placeholder copy that will have to be redone. The scope that shifts, next: a section added here, a feature thought up along the way there, each one reasonable, all of them together much less so. And approvals that drag on, especially when five people have to sign off on every mockup.
The remedy is simple, even if it takes discipline: one person who decides on the company’s side, content ready before development, and new ideas noted for a second phase rather than slipped into the first.
Getting a fair quote
The more precise your request, the more precise the quote. Before contacting providers, prepare:
- The site’s goals: what it should bring you, in requests, in sales or in time saved.
- The list of planned pages, even approximate, and the sections that seem necessary to you.
- The state of the content: ready, to be updated or to be written.
- The languages, the features and the tools the site has to connect with.
- Two or three sites you like, and why.
- Your budget, even as a range, and the date by which the site has to be live.
With those elements, the quotes describe the same project, and finally become comparable. That is the subject of our article on choosing a web design agency, and how we work on our WordPress sites: an analysis first, then a quote on a written scope.
